Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  ‘I thought about him all the time,’ Ayane said. ‘It was obvious something had happened. But I said to myself that he might just be injured – he might be lying in hospital somewhere. I knew that I should prepare for the worst. But I wasn’t prepared at all.’

  Ayane passed painful days in Sendai, clearing up the mess caused in her flat by the earthquake, thinking constantly about her father. Two weeks after the disaster, his body was found.

  She arrived back at her family home just before his coffin was carried in. Friends and extended family had gathered, most of them casually dressed – everything black, everything formal, had been washed away. ‘He hadn’t drowned, as most people did,’ Ayane said. ‘He died of a blow to the chest from some big piece of rubble. In the coffin you could only see his face through a glass window. It had been a fortnight, and I was afraid that his body might have decayed. I looked through the window. I could see that he had a few cuts, and he was pale. But it was still the face of my father.’

  She wanted to touch his face for the last time. But the casket and its window had been sealed shut. On it lay a white flower, a single cut stem placed on the coffin’s wood by the undertaker. There was nothing unusual about it. But to Ayane it was extraordinary.

  Ten days earlier, at the peak of her hope and despair, she had gone to a big public bathhouse to soak in the hot spring water. When she came out, she retrieved her boots from the locker, and felt an obstruction in the toe as she pulled them on. ‘It was a cold feeling,’ she remembered. ‘I could feel how cold it was, even through my socks. And it felt soft, fluffy.’ She reached in and removed a white flower, as fresh and flawless as if it had just been cut.

  A minor mystery: how could such an object have found its way into a boot inside a locked container? It faded from her mind, until that moment in front of her father’s coffin, when the same flower presented itself again. ‘The first time I’d had the feeling that this might be a premonition of bad news,’ Ayane said. ‘Dad might not be alive any more, and this might be a sign of his death. But then I thought about it later, about the coolness of the flower, and the whiteness of the flower, and that feeling of softness against my toe. And I thought of that as the touch of my father, which I couldn’t experience when he was in his coffin.’

  Ayane knew that the flower was just a flower. She didn’t believe in ghosts, or that her dead father had sent it to her as a sign – if such communication was possible, why would a loving parent express it in such obscure terms? ‘I think it was a coincidence,’ she said, ‘and that I made something good of it. When people see ghosts, they are telling a story, a story that had been broken off. They dream of ghosts because then the story carries on, or comes to a conclusion. And if that brings them comfort, that’s a good thing.’

  Committed to print as a kaidan, published in Hijikata’s magazine, it took on ever greater significance. ‘There were thousands of deaths, each of them different,’ Ayane said. ‘Most of them have never been told. My father’s name was Tsutomu Suto. By writing about him, I share his death with others. Perhaps I save him in some way, and perhaps I save myself.’

  Having treated, fed and sheltered the tsunami’s victims, the struggle began to prevent an invisible secondary disaster of anxiety, depression and suicide. A survey carried out a year after the disaster revealed that four out of ten survivors complained of sleeplessness, and one in five suffered from depression. There was a surge in alcoholism, and in stress-related conditions such as high blood pressure. It was a struggle to measure the crisis because of the difficulty in compiling accurate data – in the town of Rikuzen-Takata, for example, most of the social workers who would have carried out the surveys had drowned.

  Café de Monku, so simple in form, came to seem an essential emergency measure. The good it did to the tsunami refugees was obvious from their faces. Requests were coming in from all over Tohoku; Kaneta and his priests were setting out their tea and biscuits once a week or more. But he also had a busy temple to run, and all the routine obligations of a town priest – funerals, memorial ceremonies, visits to the sick and lonely, mundane tasks of administration. To everyone who knew him, it was obvious that he was taking on too much; hesitantly, and then with greater urgency, friends and family cautioned him to rest. But his presence, as comforter, organiser and leader, had become indispensable to so many people; there seemed to be no way to extricate himself from their need. The physical collapse that came at the end of 2013 was inevitable and overwhelming.

  Painful blisters erupted on his skin. He was so exhausted that he could hardly get out of bed. For weeks he did nothing, except sit in front of the television and strum on his guitar. ‘I don’t remember what I watched,’ Kaneta said. ‘I watched in a stupor. I didn’t even listen to jazz. I was a step away from depression. I had to stop doing everything, or else.’

  It was the culmination of three years of physical, psychological and spiritual crisis, but two things served as immediate triggers. One was a series of speeches that Kaneta gave in different parts of the country about the experience of the disaster. Like Sayomi Shito’s husband, Takahiro, he travelled outside the zone of disaster in the hope of communicating to the outside world the pain and complexity of the situation there. Like Takahiro, he came away with the crushing sense of having failed to express himself or to have been understood.

  The second experience was set in motion by a young woman whom I will call Rumiko Takahashi. She had telephoned Kaneta one evening in a state of incoherent distress. She talked of killing herself; she was shouting about things entering her. She too had become possessed by the spirits of the dead; she begged the priest to help her.

  Save Don’t Fall to Sea

  The Sendai District Court delivered its verdict on 26 October 2016. I took the bullet train up that morning from Tokyo. It was a warm, piercingly bright day of early autumn. Five and a half years had passed since the tsunami, and there was no obvious sign that such an event had ever taken place. The towns and cities of Tohoku were humming with the money that was being injected into the region for its reconstruction. One hundred thousand people still lived in metal houses, but these upsetting places were tucked away out of sight of the casual visitor. None of the towns destroyed by the wave had been rebuilt,1 but they had been scoured completely of rubble. Coarse, tussocky grass had overgrown the coastal strip, and those ruins that poked through it looked more like neglected archaeological sites than places of continuing pain and despair.

  The court building was a short taxi ride from the station. Inside, I joined a queue and drew a lucky ticket for the public seats. An hour remained until the hearing began. I stood outside at the front of the courthouse, where reporters and photographers were milling lazily; a ripple of animation passed through them at the arrival of a procession, slowly making its way through the sunshine. It was the plaintiffs in the case, the mothers and fathers of the Okawa children, walking along the pavement, three abreast. Apart from Naomi Hiratsuka, all the parents I had got to know best were there. They wore black. Several carried framed photographs of their sons and daughters. The three men at the front held a wide banner. Around its margins were the faces of the children, the twenty-three children named in the case, photographed at home, at school or playing outside, laughing, smiling or solemn. In the centre was a sentence of Japanese, the characters carefully hand-painted with an ink brush: We did what our teachers told us.

  It was a profoundly dignified spectacle. The group entered the courthouse and split into smaller groups, as plaintiffs and defendants, lawyers, journalists and members of the public waited for the proceedings to get under way. There was no obvious anxiety or tension; there was comradely pleasure in the coming together of old allies and acquaintances. But everyone present was conscious of the possibility of defeat. Yoshioka had made his case as well as he could, but certain facts remained unalterable. The plaintiffs were a small group of individuals; the defendants were a city and a prefecture; and Japanese courts were conservative. ‘Whatever the ver
dict today,’ said Takahiro Shito, ‘it will just add to the sum of all the other experiences we have had up until now. It was our responsibility to do this, as parents. This is part of what it means to bring children into the world. Of course, I’m worried about the verdict going against us. But if it does, it would mean that a school does not have to protect the lives of its pupils. And that should never be the case.’ The parents had just come from a meeting with their lawyer, Shito said. The delivery of the verdict would take only a matter of moments, he had told them; it would be obvious in the first few seconds which way it was going to go.

  The doors of the courtroom were opened, and everyone took their places. The five defence lawyers sat on the right, and on the left were the black-clad parents. I looked across at them from the public seats. How many hours I had spent talking to them over the years, in conversations filled with intense, and sometimes unbearable, detail. Grief was in their noses like a stench; it was the first thing they thought of when they woke in the morning, and the last thing in their minds as they went to sleep at night. They had spoken about each stage of the lives of their children, in childhood, infancy, even in gestation. They remembered the school, and the community of families of which it was the focus. They described the disaster and its unfolding, the blows of realisation that followed, and the asphyxia of loss and of survival. Like the plot of a fiction, these remembrances culminated in belief in a mystery, in things missing, removed and deliberately hidden – a conspiracy, in other words, which not only worsened the pain of grief, but rendered it incomprehensible. It expressed itself in impotent, inward-turning anger, and in unanswered questions about particular individuals. Why did this one not do his job? Why did this one tell a lie? Why will that one not speak to us?

  There had indeed been a cover-up, but of a pitifully unambitious and ill-executed kind: inconsistent, banal and transparent. There was no grand plan, no mastermind – even to call it a conspiracy was to grant it a dignity and cunning that Kashiba and the mediocrities of the Ishinomaki Education Board never possessed. A group of unexceptional men had failed dismally. They didn’t even try very hard to deny their failure, just to contain it within manageable bounds. They were stubborn, clumsy and charmless, personally and institutionally. But if Kashiba had fallen to his knees and confessed his negligence, and if Junji Endo had come forward and wept out his story once again – nothing that mattered would be significantly changed.2

  The true mystery of Okawa school was the one we all face. No mind can encompass it; consciousness recoils in panic. The idea of conspiracy is what we supply to make sense of what will never be sensible – the fiery fact of death.

  Extinction of life: extinction of a perfect, a beloved child: for eternity.

  Impossible! the soul cries out. What are they hiding?

  A door opened noiselessly, and all at once the three judges – a young woman and two middle-aged men – were seated in their black gowns. The judge in the centre began speaking, fast, quietly and without inflection. The Japanese he used, formal and legalistic, was beyond my grasp. So I focused instead on the faces of the listening parents – there, surely, I would immediately be able to read the verdict, in their anger or jubilation. The faces looked intently at the judge. They frowned in concentration; their features were blank and expressionless. And then, as suddenly as it began, it was all over, and the occupants of the court were standing up and filing out.

  The dark-clad parents were on their feet too. They exchanged no words or glances; they looked grave and even grim; they looked like people who had received deeply troubling news. And yet, towards the end, I thought I had been able to follow part of the judge’s ruling, the part when he seemed to be ordering the defendants to pay what sounded like a very large sum of money.

  I stepped out into the corridor where the Japanese reporters were huddled, comparing their notes. I had not misunderstood. The Okawa parents had won their case – they had been awarded more than £11 million. All their children were still dead.

  The final judgment ran to 87 pages. It surveyed in detail the actions taken by the teachers, and found no fault in their behaviour immediately after the 2.46 p.m. earthquake. It was ‘not inappropriate’, the judges insisted, to keep the children at school. For the first forty minutes that they waited in the playground, even after the first radio warnings, ‘it cannot be said that the teachers could foresee the danger of being hit by a tsunami’. But then, at 3.30 p.m., the vans from the city office had careered past, blaring their frantic warning about the sea breaking over the beachside forest of pines. At that point, seven minutes before it eventually arrived, ‘the teachers could have foreseen the coming of a huge tsunami to Okawa Primary School’. The place of evacuation that was eventually chosen, the traffic island by the bridge, was ‘inappropriate’. ‘The teachers,’ the judgment said, ‘should have evacuated the children up the hill at the back, which was unobstructed.’

  The damages – ¥1.43 billionfn1 – were less than the ¥2.3 billion that had been demanded, but still at the high end of those habitually awarded by the courts. Once legal costs were accounted for, the plaintiffs would receive some ¥60 million – about £470,000 – for each child lost. Japanese judges were expert at forging compromise and delivering verdicts in which both sides won something of the argument, neither was humiliated, and vindication was impossible to tease out. This was not such a judgment. It was a decisive legal victory, an unambiguous assignment of responsibility, which nonetheless completely failed to concern itself with the things that mattered to the parents the most.

  It expressed no opinion about the actions of Kashiba, the headmaster, before or after the tsunami. It absolved the teachers from blame over the chaotic emergency manual. It was silent about the evasions of the board of education, about the disposal of the notes on the interviews with the children, about the untruths of Junji Endo, and about his failure to give an account of himself. A little while after the verdict, three of the fathers came before the cameras with another carefully hand-brushed placard. ‘We prevailed,’ it read. ‘The voices of the children were heard!’ But there could hardly have been less sense of triumph;3 as they talked about it afterwards, the families of the dead children expressed nothing stronger than relief at the absence of defeat.

  ‘As far as the death of my daughter goes, we won, I suppose,’ said Hideaki Tadano. ‘But my son, Tetsuya, and me – we have been beaten. They’ve been beating us from the moment it happened, with their lies and their evasions. This verdict lets them get away with it – the falsifications, the hiding of evidence. That kind of thing should never be tolerated. I don’t want a world in which that kind of thing is allowed.’

  ‘December is the time when the day is the shortest,’ said Reverend Kaneta. ‘And then midwinter comes, and the light begins to return. That was the moment for me. When the days began to get longer I recovered my energy. For three years, stress had been stored up inside me. It was pent up. Over the winter, I let it go.’

  Months of precious inactivity healed Kaneta. With the crisis past, he returned to the life of his temple. The world around him was unchanged, still shadowed by grief and by ghosts. But the priest had been renewed. ‘For a long time, I felt that everything I had learned had no reality,’ he said. ‘But the reality returned. It was a revival of my faith. When I was on the verge of collapse, it came back to me from a deeper level.’

  He began to rediscover the clarity that he had glimpsed in the starry sky on the first night of the disaster. The question with which he struggled – the question put most insistently by survivors – was the oldest one of all. ‘What does life mean, in the face of death?’ Kaneta said. ‘That was what people wanted to know. An old woman told me, “My grandchild was washed away before my eyes. I am ninety years old, and I lived. What am I supposed to make of that? Can you answer me, priest?” People who survived wanted to understand their survival. For a long time, I couldn’t explain it to them.’

  Kaneta said, ‘What determined life or death
? No Buddhist priest knows, no Christian pastor – not even the Pope in Rome. So I would say, “There’s one thing I can tell you, and that is that you are alive, and so am I. This is a certainty. And if we are alive, then there must be some meaning to it. So let’s think about it, and keep thinking about it. I’ll be with you as we think. I’ll stay with you, and we will do it together.” Perhaps it sounds glib. But that is what I could say.’

  I asked Kaneta about Okawa Primary School. He was a specialist in grief and suffering, and an instinctive ally of the small man and the underdog. The death of the children was the single grossest tragedy of the whole immense disaster, a distillation of its arbitrariness and horror. So it was striking, at first, to hear him talk of it in tones of such detachment.

  He had often been to the school and prayed there; a nearby community of temporary homes had hosted Café de Monku. But the local priest had discouraged Kaneta and his team from ministering directly to the families of the children; and he knew none of them personally. ‘Of course I know that seventy-four children died there,’ he said. ‘And that it was widely reported, and that the families brought a legal case. But I don’t want to set what happened there apart from, or above, anywhere else. There are places all over this land, places little known or forgotten, where many people died, where many are grieving.’

  I asked him what kind of consolation a priest could offer to people such as the parents of Okawa school, and he was quiet for a moment. ‘You have to be careful,’ he said. ‘You have to be very careful in asking this of people who have lost their children. It takes long months, long years – it might take a whole lifetime. It might be the very last thing that you say to someone. But perhaps all that we can tell them in the end is to accept. The task of acceptance is very hard. It’s up to every single person, individually. People of religion can only play a part in achieving that – they need the support of everyone around them. We watch them, watch over them. We remember our place in the cosmos, as we work. We stay with them, and we walk together. That’s all we can do.’